US drug giant halts Celebrex advertising

Drug giant Pfizer is to stop advertising its best-selling arthritis pain reliever Celebrex after a study showed high doses of it were associated with an increased heart attack risk.

The move covered television, radio, newspaper and magazine advertising, Pfizer spokeswoman Mariann Caprino said.

The US Food and Drug Administration, which said it was considering warning labels for Celebrex or withdrawing the drug from the US market, agreed with Pfizer’s decision to halt advertising.

“We discussed it with the FDA, and we all concurred that it was the appropriate step,” Caprino told The New York Times.

Pfizer said it planned to keep Celebrex on the market and would continue marketing the drug to doctors.

Celebrex had not been shown to be dangerous to arthritis patients when taken at normal doses, Pfizer said. The heart attack risk in the study disclosed on Friday occurred when patients took the drug at two to four times the usual dose for many months.

New York-based Pfizer Inc spent more than £38m (€55.3m) advertising Celebrex to US consumers in the first nine months of this year.

Sales of Celebrex and a related drug, Bextra, had been expected to total more than £2bn (€2.9bn) worldwide in 2004, nearly 10% of Pfizer’s revenue.

News of the increased heart risk for Celebrex patients came in one of two long-term cancer-prevention trials.

The National Cancer Institute, which was conducting the study for Pfizer, said patients in the clinical trial taking 800 milligrammes of Celebrex had a 3.4 times greater risk of cardiovascular problems compared with a placebo.

For patients in the trial taking 400 milligrammes of Celebrex, the risk was 2.5 times greater. The average duration of treatment in the trial was 33 months.